


Magnificent Obsession

by MasterOfAllImagination



Category: The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: Gen, according to multiple interviews, accordingly; i wrote it, and acted his part accordingly, and i thought that was a dynamic worthy of a 40k fic, but the love a master chess player has for a worthy opponent, donald sutherland felt that snow was in love with katniss, not necessarily a romantic love perhaps, or the way thunder loves lightning, the way a dying man loves his last reason for living
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-03
Updated: 2016-09-03
Packaged: 2018-08-12 20:29:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7947961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MasterOfAllImagination/pseuds/MasterOfAllImagination
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Katniss Everdeen walks among his thoughts as though she owns the ground her feet tread, so it is only fair that he leaves her roses as a reminder in kind: <i>I cannot forget, and therefore, nor shall you.</i></p><p>(All four movies, through Snow's eyes.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Magnificent Obsession

Snow’s attention is split three ways: at his feet, his granddaughter fiddles absently with a small gilt tiara; on his lap lies an open folio full of Crane’s final Arena readiness reports, and in front of them, the Reaping of District Twelve plays live on a holo projector.  

Effie Trinket moves to draw out the first name. “Sit still, darling,” he says quietly to his granddaughter.  

The girl who steps out of the crowd is young; young enough not to matter to him, for tributes that age never last long.  Snow glances at her face briefly, and then to his granddaughter’s, and then back again, just in time to catch the disruption that goes up in District Twelve’s square on the projection.  For a moment, the cameras scramble to get it in focus, and Snow sets aside the folio so he can lean forward. Another girl, several years older, is fighting back against two restraining Peackeepers; screaming something in a voice so raw that it is nearly unintelligible.

“Grandpa, what’s--”

“Quiet,” Snow commands. After a moment, he relents. “Watch, and you will find out.”

“ _I volunteer!_ _I volunteer as tribute!”_

His granddaughter gasps in delight. “She volunteered! The outer districts _never_ volunteer!”

Snow is silent.  His focus lingers on Trinket and the word she’s coaxing out of the screaming teenager in the faded blue dress: _sister_.

“What a brave girl,” Snow allows. He pulls the folio back to him and thinks, _what a brave, foolish girl._

 

The next time the volunteer crosses his mind is three days later, and given that she and her fellow tribute are literally _on fire_ as they come down the Avenue, she’s very hard to ignore.

Even he, for whom the sparkle and shine of the Tribute Parade has weakened to dullness over seventy-three repetitions, is reluctantly impressed.  The idle dance of his fingertips against the arm of his chair as he waits to give his commencement speech slows by degrees. Such pageantry is usually saved by mentors for the later stages of the Games, but the crowd is so much the more entertained for its unexpectedness.  It is as though Twelve’s stylist is fighting on Snow’s behalf to keep the formulaic Games fresh.

He moves his head subtly, aware of the multiple cameras trained on him, angling for a better view of the monitors. The male tribute looks temporarily shocked by the crowd’s roar, but soon enough he pushes it away in favor of excitement.  But the female volunteer’s emotions are harder to categorize.  Incredulity lingers on her for mere moments before being ushered out by cool interest. She has already learned the first lesson of the Capitol: always wear a mask.

He tilts his chin in the other direction, switching his focus to a different screen that shows her face blown up hundreds of times its actual size. Unaware, she looks directly into a camera, and he makes brief contact with her pixelated eyes.

Eventually he shifts his study to the rest of the parade, returning every so often to the back of the line where Twelve’s flames constantly prick at the periphery of his vision.  

Their chariots halt. Over his earpiece, Crane informs him, “President Snow, you’re live.”

He approaches the podium and speaks.  He could give this address in his sleep.  In fact, his eyes are heavy; boredom perceived as solemnity.  But the flicker of artificial flame draws him out of absolute detachment like an intermittent sun on an overcast day.  A volunteer with a dress too loud for her station. What—if anything—next?  

“We wish you happy Hunger Games,” he says, with the air of a blessing bestowed, “and may the odds be _ever_ in your favor,” although the last part is less a blessing and more akin to complimenting the suit of a man on his way to his own execution.

The chariots turn and wheel back toward the Tribute Center, more slowly this time, and this is the crowd’s cue to begin dispersing. He is among the first to hasten away, casting around belatedly for a name to put to the girl’s face—finding _female tribute from Twelve_ too cumbersome-- and coming up at last with _Katniss Everdeen_.

 

He does not forget her name again; not that the 24-hour news cycle he runs uninterrupted in the background of his office would let him, for he is not the only one who has spotted her deviations and taken note. Flickerman and Templesmith cannot stop parroting her name: a constant refrain of _Katniss Everdeen, Katniss Everdeen,_ and slightly less frequently, _Peeta Mellark_ and _District Twelve_ all blur into one annoying mess, like some kind of particularly insidious marketing campaign for the latest gadget out of Three.

Other matters wrest back his attention after a day or so of this. He meets several times with the Gamemakers, finalizing preparations and adding last-minute embellishments to the Arena, this year a somewhat generic forest environ. It was universally agreed upon that keeping the 74th Games a relatively subdued affair would enable them to properly set off the lavish spectacle of the coming Quarter Quell.

Days cease to pass unmarked by annoyance this close to the Games’ start. No hour spares him from distraction, and small inconveniences turn his mouth down far more than they ought, like an Avox setting down a cup of coffee in front of him instead of his asked-for tea.

Snow turns the cup in its saucer, looking down his nose at the rising steam, the modest amount of liquid rapidly tainting the air with its deceptively pleasant scent.  A scene flashes at the back of his eyes: slipping his little finger through the delicate handle and upending the entire thing with a flick of his wrist, watching the slow-dripping mess and the mute servant’s scramble to clean it with equal interest. 

But there is a time-sensitive report on broadcasting infrastructure in front of him, and the carpets are antique.  With utter detachment, he pushes the saucer away from him; just to the comfortable extent of his arm.  He picks up the report again, the Avox just at the corner of his eye, hurriedly snatching up the rejected cup.  The Avox leaves. Snow looks up briefly at the sound of the closing door, running his tongue along the roof of his mouth and wincing at its soreness. He presses a thumb to his cheek, feeling the pressure against his molars, and with a small twist of his neck returns to the report.

 

Someone of no consequence brings him the sponsor’s ratings of the tributes before they are aired, and, along with them, an unprompted and breathless story about a pig and an apple and an arrow.

“Katniss Everdeen did _what_?” Snow asks sharply.  

The aide sputters, under the impression that he has been misunderstood, so he begins to repeat the anecdote, albeit more slowly.  Snow loses patience with this farce quickly and waves him out. As soon as they are gone he calls up the footage of the assessments himself, watching Everdeen’s over the steepled tips of his fingers.  

She walks in slowly, but unhesitatingly takes a provided bow from the weapons rack.  In her hands it looks like a comforting and familiar tool; the only thing she seems certain of as she eyes Crane and his sponsors gathered in the observation booth above her.  Snow imagines only a few of them deign to return her gaze.

Under their sparse but present scrutiny, her first arrow goes comically wide.  Most of the sponsors likely lose interest at this point, dismissing her as a generous four, but the camera angle is such that he cannot be sure.  She tries again. Freed from their appraisal, the second shot finds the man-shaped target’s heart unerringly.  An impressive feat overshadowed by the girl’s poor grace under pressure. A failing that will likely become her cause of death in the Arena.  He is beginning to think suspect that he misheard the messenger’s ramblings; that with her audience obliviously enjoying their comfits her third arrow will surely bury itself in foam as ably and ordinarily as the second had, but then--

\--she decides quickly, draws quickly, and fires quickly.  No hesitation. No way for anyone outside of her skull to have parceled out her next act before the instance of its happening. Off camera, a wet thud and a sharp silence follow one another quickly: an arrow and an apple and a wall, in that order.

Mockingly, she bows, and thanks them for their consideration.

Snow sits back and replays the footage four times to be sure of what he’s seen.  Holding back an appreciative chuckle is harder than it should be.  

It was audacious. It was unexpected; unpredictable.

And at the realization of the last, the desire to laugh leaves him.  He shuts off the recording, straightens his face and his violet silk suit with equal care, and calls for Crane.  

* * *

The greenhouse is his in every way. His own hand drew out the first sketches of its glass architecture. He tends the plants personally most days, oftentimes on the nights he cannot sleep. And the roses themselves are his, too-- a unique crossbreed bioengineered to his own specifications almost two decades ago.  

It is a microcosm of perfection.  No one is permitted to disturb its stasis save whom he invites; and the invitations are never civil ones. Glass walls can imprison an adversary far more subtly than stone can.

By the time Crane arrives, he has been waiting for some time, at ease in the familiar pressing warmth of the garden.  He’s cut himself a rose to occupy his hands.  Mindlessly, he snips away at it, the pinch of the shears growing sharper with each cut. Footsteps eventually announce Crane, whom Snow does not immediately acknowledge. He makes him wait. Makes him sweat a little bit in the heat he is so unaccustomed to.

 _Snip._ A leaf flutters down to the flagstones.

“An eleven?” Snow sneers. He hopes he does not need require more words that that to convey the depth of his incredulity.

Unashamed, Crane replies, “She earned it.”

“She shot an _arrow_ at your _head_.”

“Well, at an apple.”

“ _Near_ your head,” he corrects, his exasperation aimed more at Crane’s impreciseness than Everdeen’s stunt.  “Sit down.” Out of his periphery, Snow watches Crane take the farthest possible perch on the bench.  He has had plenty of time to think of the exact words with which to caution his Head Gamemaker.  “Seneca,” he begins, as though his thoughts have just occurred to him, “why do you think we have a winner?”

“What do you mean?”

 _Snip_. “I mean,” he repeats, setting his shears against his thigh and speaking as though addressing a particularly dense child, “ _why do we have a winner_?  I _mean_ , if we just wanted to intimidate the districts, why not round up twenty-four of them at random and execute them all at once? It’d be a lot _faster_.”

The man only gapes at him.

Seneca Crane, contrary to present appearance, is a highly intelligent and capable Head Gamemaker. His eye for detail is unparalleled among his peers. But like so many of his fellow Capitolites, he fails to grasp the larger picture.  Snow prefers this quality in an underling. So, at the risk of hypocrisy, he can find fault in this, but not blame.

“Hope,” Snow supplies.

“Hope?”

 _Snip_. “Hope.  It is the only thing stronger than fear.  A little hope is effective. A lot of hope is dangerous. A spark is fine, as long as it’s contained.”  It isn’t even one of his more delicate metaphors. The “spark” clearly indicates Katniss Everdeen. At last, this fact seems to penetrate Crane’s carefully manicured beard.

“So…?”

 _Snip_. _Snip._ The rose is nearly bereft of its leaves when he looks up, sees Crane’s unabated obtuseness, and is forced to spell out his meaning even more explicitly: “So, _contain it_.”

“Right.” Crane still may not fully understand, but at least he recognizes an order and a target when he is given them. This, too, is how Snow prefers his underlings to be.

One last _snip_ and Crane stands.  When Snow does not look up from the pruned flower, its stem now neatly sheared in half, Crane leaves him be, treading through discarded leaves on his way out.  

The colorlessness of the rose contrasts starkly, pleasingly, against the fabric of his dark robe. He turns it carefully in his fingers.  Though the best geneticists in Panem have bred this genus to the height of its olfactory capabilities, Snow can bury his nose in its petals and detect only the faintest trace of its perfume.  Long wear and proximity have inured him to it.   

Yet others are not so immune, so he ensures that it is firmly threaded through a buttonhole before leaving the garden.

 

Everything moves quickly at the beginning of the Games. Reapings, parades, interviews, and media coverage all converge fast on the heels of one another, stirring the Capitol citizens and most of the Districts into distracted frenzies for days. Later, inevitably, it all slows down. Games have been known to go on for weeks, although the Head Gamemaker always does his or her best to prod the action along when necessary.

Unfortunately, some of the tributes resist prodding.

Snow wonders if Everdeen really fits this mold. If he is perhaps being over-cautious. The Games see (and kill) brash, talented tributes every year. She merely comes from a different district than those teenagers usually do.

In front of him, barely noticed, lies an elaborately plated meal, and around him sits Crane and his sponsors, to a man discussing Everdeen’s stunt. Their main dish had even been prepared in its presumable satire (although, to him, the sentiment smacks too closely of admiration): whole pheasant braised in mustard and apple.

A man entirely swathed in black solicits Snow’s opinion on the event. “What did you think of it, President Snow? Was it worthy of an eleven?”

Snow smiles faintly and takes a small piece of meat into his mouth, chewing briefly, not so much a bid to gather time for his thoughts as a pause taken to draw the last of the disjointed conversation fully to himself.

“I do not believe in rewarding impudence,” he says, pinning Crane with his stare, “but our dear Seneca and I don’t necessarily see eye to eye on that topic. Do we?”

Crane shifts slightly higher in his chair. “It was a joint decision made by all the sponsors,” Crane claims.  He deliberately sets down his knife and fork to either side of his plate. “Besides. I believe in rating tributes based on potential performance, not potential attitude.”  Titters echo around the table.  

Snow raises his glass and drinks, an unappreciative toast to Crane’s successful parry. The rest of the gathered follow suit.  

 

Soon after comes the final interviews-- to Snow, the gap between the Reaping and the beginning of the Games grows shorter and shorter every year-- and he watches Everdeen on camera for the fourth time, walking onto the stage in an apparent daze.  Unlike before, he does not permit himself to pass any judgement.  Only to observe. In his eyes, her unpredictability is like a defective machine turning out thousands of perfect parts alongside a single twisted mistake, detectable only through careful monitoring. Such close study of a girl doomed to die is, in his estimation, an unfortunate but unavoidable waste of mental energy.

She spins, and the hem of her dress flares with artificial flames. Underneath, there is a flash of pale ankle; the rotations of her heeled feet unpracticed and teetering on the edge of ungraceful.  The crowd sees the flame’s pomp and strength, but he sees only the fallibility of skin.  

“I told her that I would try to win. For her,” she tells Caesar concerning her sister, something like sincerity seeping through the veneer of showmanship.

“Valiant, but futile, my dear. Valiant but futile,” Snow says aloud, alone in his empty office.  The last time a tribute from Twelve won the games was during the second Quarter Quell, nearly twenty-five years past. There was a boy from Nine who had once possessed a charisma similar to hers, but it had shriveled up in the cauldron of the Arena. 

Yet the misery of her honesty inexplicably charms the crowd. Of all the half-lies and partial-truths that parade across that stage each year, it is always the naked things that bite deepest into citizens’ sympathies, no matter how ugly, no matter how unrelatable to their own lives.

He’d tried to drive this point home to Crane earlier in the day after hearing Flickerman refer to Everdeen by one of her more inane nicknames one time too many.

“ _Girl on Fire_ ,” Snow had spat at him out of the blue, expecting his Head Gamemaker to unravel the thread of the thought on his own, too irked to elaborate himself.

“Well, that sort of fell out of Caesar’s mouth, but, uh, then we picked it up--”

“You thought that she needed a nickname?”

Crane shrugs. “Why not?”

“She volunteered.”

“That’s why it stuck.”

At this point, Snow had turned away in sheer disgust.

“I mean we don’t have to,” Crane had nevertheless blundered on, “but it’s kind of a, it’s kind of a gift. We’re always building up One and Two; to have a girl emerge from a higher-number District…”

And that was the crux of Snow’s problem. A girl from nowhere, upsetting the balance of power in the Game’s formula, and the Head Gamemaker himself naively encouraging it. Ordering Flickerman and Templesmith to retcon the moniker appeals to him viscerally if not logically.

“If you think it best,” Snow says tightly, with a smile no more relaxed.

Which brings them to this moment: the opening of the Games, to be simultaneously broadcast across twelve district routing centers, two hundred eighty regional signal boosters, nine-hundred-odd relay stations and one million in-home projectors. Like every other citizen in Panem—like the Capitolites, still drunk from the previous night’s revels; the regimented ranks of Peacekeepers in their barracks, like the lowest and smallest cog in the great factories of Five—Snow watches the Games begin. 

Twenty-four rise up from the ground and into place around the Cornucopia.  Cameras zoom into their faces, the fear of death reflected over and over like a prism. The Careers hide it as they have been taught, but he impeccably draws the signs out of their stoicism: a nervous dart of the eye to the side; an extraneous blink, a too-tight jaw.

No camera covers Everdeen, but one lingers on Mellark, and he stares long enough at her to make up for it.  

_3-2-1—_

_\--_ and they’re off like stabbed rats.  The camera pulls wide, capturing the chaos from a high angle (the Replays will show the deaths in detail later), and Snow jumps from figure to figure, District of origin indeterminate at this distance, each running/dying/attacking figure an anonymous insect scurrying about in a perfectly manicured terrarium.  He ticks off the deaths on his fingers and calculates statistics on the spot in his head.

All four of the lowest numbered District’s tributes survive the initial bloodbath. All four of the highest Districts’, too.  An intriguing mix.

* * *

For a boy in love, Peeta Mellark tries  _awfully_ hard to get his paramour killed.  For a little while, Snow finds himself rooting for him. 

Right up until the moment he susses out the ploy.

* * *

 

“Katniss! Katniss, help!”

He glances briefly at the broadcast flickering on the corner of his desk. For a moment, he allows his eyes to stray from the monotonous but necessary mountain of paperwork before him and watch as Everdeen scrambles her way through the Arena toward the cries of the girl from Eleven.

But then he goes back to the documents. Each must be read twice, signed in indelible ink, and placed in separate piles before the next in the stack takes its place before him.

The projector spits out faint background noises of harsh breathing and rustling deadfall that fade away to near-silence in face of his focus as he resumes his task.  Flickerman’s voice shatters that concentration in an instant.

“--ladies and gentlemen, what an _upset_ we’ve just had here! Our girl on fire has made her first direct kill! Let’s watch it again on the Instant Replay, Claudius, if you would be so kind--”

She nocks and looses her arrow into the chest of the Career who had just killed the girl from Eleven with the same unhesitating determination she’d displayed when spearing the apple in that pig’s mouth. Like the boy was nothing more to her than a foam target with a red bulls-eye on his chest. It affects her just about as much, and for a moment, Snow’s hand freezes above the table halfway through the act of setting aside a completed report.  Of all the things he has observed Katniss Everdeen to be, _heartless_ is not one of them.

And then she turns to her fallen ally, and it seems she is not without mercy after all: just more discerning of whom she deems worthy of it.

“You’re okay, you’re okay,” she uselessly croons, kneeling on the forest floor and covered in blood.

Snow shakes his head slowly.

Eleven’s last words to her are a lovingly-filmed, whispered exhortation: “ _You have to win_.”

Everdeen’s head turns morbidly toward the boy she’d killed.  Snow remembers to put down the page still suspended in his hand just as Eleven breathes her last and Everdeen breaks down into graceless sobs.  They morph into wordless screams, and then, when the futility of her wrath has exhausted her, she leaves Eleven’s side and stands.  The desk before Snow is bare, but he does not yet reach for another paper.  

Instead of clearing out of the area like any tribute with half an instinct for self-preservation would do, Everdeen starts gathering flowers.  Multiple, lovely, wild things; things that some Gamemaker probably included in the plans of the Arena out of sheer vanity; purposeless and superfluous. Soon, her arms are crowded and overflowing, and she places them in a halo around the fallen tribute’s head as carefully as a Capitol florist would arrange exotic orchids in a vase for a state dinner.

Snow watches in the same morbidly fascinated way Everdeen had stared at the slain Career.  A small voice is pressing at the back of his skull, whispering of unease, but he turns up the volume on the feed instead. Just then, Everdeen finishes her task and looks up for the first time, unerringly picking out the nearest hidden camera. She raises the middle three fingers of her right hand to her lips in the same salute that her fellows in District Twelve had given her on Reaping Day, and the voice at the back of his head begins to scream a moment too late.

He stabs out the sequence of buttons that will put him in contact with the Arena control center.  After two rings-- an eternity in which he doesn’t dare tear his eyes from the projection, as if his hatred alone could halt what he sees unfurling before him-- Crane answers.

“Are you seeing this?” the man greets. “Because if you are, I’m sure you’ll agree that I’m a bit busy at the--”

“Cut it now,” Snow growls. “Cut it _now_.”

“...sir?  You want me to--”

“ _Cut. It._ Or so help me, Seneca, I will cut your throat instead.”

A little quieter, he hears Crane giving the order in the background-- _drop the feed, cut to someone else. I don’t know, anyone! Direct orders from the President!--_ and then his voice comes back at full volume.

“All right, it’s done. But that was incredible stuff, and our viewers were eating it up--”

“Who saw?”

“Uh… everyone. Everyone.”

Snow takes a deep breath, shuts his eyes, and slowly exhales. A light is blinking silently at him, indicating another incoming call.

“Tell Flickerman to keep it off the Replays. We will need to speak again in person soon.”

“Sure thing. Sir.” Crane signs off, the incredulity in his voice bordering on insubordinate, but Snow has no time to pay it mind because the light is still blinking, and somewhere in Panem, things are not as they should be. As soon as Crane’s connection goes dead he opens the waiting call.

District Eleven’s Head Peacekeeper Arcturus Atticus gives him a terse, breathy run-down of a situation of unrest developing in Eleven in one ear, and in the other, the very instigator of the chaos herself continues to noisily fall apart.  

“I want updates every quarter hour,” Snow says after a while, already beginning to tune out Atticus’s haphazard report, furiously thumbing the remote’s mute to silence Everdeen’s grating sobs. “And I want this contained. Quickly.”

 

He waits a while before making his next call.  It is time he takes to think and absorb; to field the scattered but dwindling panic of the events occurring in Eleven; to decide if this is a precipice or if this is the bottom of a cliff.

The Mayor of Twelve is such a rare contact he has to have someone else look up and make the connection for him. He fields the man's startled obsequiousness and asks him a very simple question: "Tell me about Katniss Everdeen." 

“We are all very proud of Katniss here in Twelve,” Undersee enthuses, writhing on his chair as though it were laden with tacks. “She’s a quiet girl. Lost her father when she was quite young, poor thing. The usual mischief, of course, but at that age—“

“What kind of mischief?” Snow interrupts.

Undersee’s highly mobile face inverts itself several times, trying on different reactions for size, attempting to match whatever he thinks Snow would most like to see. Snow’s own face gives him no clues, flirting with adjectives such as “corpse-like” and "necrotic."  

Slowly, Undersee admits, “…I hear she does well on the black market.”

“Does she have a file?”

“Yes,” Undersee says immediately.

“Forward it to my office and attach your own observations. I will have to cut this short.” Snow looks at the clock off-screen without reading it. “I have a prior engagement.”

“Of course, President Snow, sir. Of course. Right away.”

The transmission ends, and Snow waits. A more or less constant stream of messages keeps his desk covered in paper for most of the day, but as soon as Undersee’s report comes through, he brings it to the top of the pile.

She’s from nothing. Her family is a family of no-ones.  She hunts illegally but is never disciplined for it; her tesserae total flirts with fate.  He can plot the trajectory that her upbringing has set her on in a path that leads very cleary to this moment: a familial instinct made strong through loss, spurring her to take her sister’s place at the Reaping, bringing her to the Arena, causing her to befriend Eleven’s female tribute.  And then the girl died and Everdeen became a nick in his blade, or a nail hobbles and maims when trodden over in the night. If left unchecked, perhaps her trajectory might yet turn her into a rusty knife, whose cut is small but festering.   

That last possibility is, admittedly, unlikely.  But the odds have been in Katniss Everdeen’s favor of late. It would not do to bet against her and lose.

After he has wrung Undersee’s words dry of any information or suggestion, he turns back to the hard facts of the brief episode of civil unrest:

_Half-ton of fertilizer spilled_

_200 Peacekeepers deployed in force_

_Crowds upwards of 1000 dispersed with water cannons_

_Eighteen civilians injured; one dead; fifty-four disciplined_

Such numbers cannot accumulate further.  If Crane had done as he’d asked and contained Katniss Everdeen in the beginning, they would not have arisen at all.  

The man himself comes when he’s called, like the good dog he is. “We can distract them,” Crane placates immediately, speaking desperately with his hands. “Let’s put her back together with the boy.  ‘The star-crossed lovers from District Twelve.’ Give them something to root for that refocuses their attention.  We’ll announce a rule change-- two victors, as long as they’re from the same District-- and watch what happens.”  For all his haste, it sounds well thought-out, and it briefly occurs to Snow to wonder if the idea didn’t originally come from Crane.

“So you like an underdog,” he muses.

“Everyone likes an underdog.”

“ _I_ don’t.” Crane sees what the people want. Snow sees what the people need.  He isn’t convinced the two are in alignment. “Have you been out there? Ten, Eleven, Twelve?”

“Uh, not personally, no.”

“I have,” Snow says. “Lots of underdogs. Lots of coal, too. They’re growing crops, minerals. Things we need.” But he is considering Crane’s Hail Mary even as he continues to doubt it in words. “There are lots of underdogs. And I think if you could see them, you would not root for them either.”

Crane nods, but it is the flailing of a man floundering in deep dark waters. It is not the first instance of unrest the Games have ever sparked, but Everdeen is different: her destruction is unwitting.  Crane seems eager to fix the mistake he wasn’t quick enough to prevent from happening in the first place, and his proposed solution will cost them nothing to try.  If he drowns, on _his_ head be it.

Of course, the only reference Snow makes to his vision of Crane’s likely future is to say, “I like you. Be careful.”

* * *

 

Snow makes the discreet trip out to Two ostensibly to pay a visit to his son’s family. In reality, it is nothing more than a front for the off-record meeting scheduled with Gerner Rolshe, High Commander of Panem’s Peacekeepers.  Seeing as Rolshe is the father of his son’s wife, this, too, technically falls under the definition of “visiting family.”

Morning he leaves, midday he arrives. The populace is at work, the neat streets are quiet, and Snow’s unmarked car passes unnoticed as it wends its way into his son’s wealthy neighborhood. An Avox lets him into the house, one guard passing in front, one behind. Snow beckons the Avox back, a request for a meal just about to pass his lips, but then his son steps into the foyer from the hall and his appetite deserts him.  He folds his hands in front of him and gives a smile that must look as ghastly as it feels. “Phoebus.”

“Father.”

Silence, as long as the foyer between them. Snow takes a step forward and looks around at molding he has seen a dozen times. “Where is my beloved granddaughter?” he asks at last.

“Zoe is in school.”

“My daughter-in-law?”

“At headquarters.”

“And why are you not with her?”

“Rolshe informed me of your arrival. I came down to meet you.”

A more unwelcome greeting could not have been fathomed. “Entirely unnecessary. I’m sure you are aware that this visit is purely business, and that business is with Rolshe.”

“I _am_ aware.” Faintly, Snow thinks he can detect the grinding of his son’s teeth. “I thought it would be a good idea to keep up appearances.”

Snow fixes him with an empty look. “Some might think so.” A shake of the head. “No matter. I won’t stay long enough for notice.”

Phoebus glances towards the ignored Avox, lingering a little too long in that direction for a casual look. “Will you stay for lunch?”  

His son thinks he will refuse. So he doesn’t. “Yes. I think I shall.”

A careful blank mask comes over Phoebus’s features, the closest he was ever able of coming to dissimulation. “Unfortunately, I must return to headquarters myself.”

“Unfortunately,” Snow murmurs, his lips hardly moving.

Phoebus sweeps past him with a cursory “goodbye, father,” and Snow turns back to the Avox, demanding of him, “ _well_?”

He eats. His car takes him to the city gardens, where he finds Rolshe—out of uniform—in their agreed-upon meeting spot.  Nevertheless, Rolshe rises respectfully as he catches sight of him, his grey head nearly eclipsing Snow’s own in height, and salutes. Snow shakes his hand.

They fall into step. The gardens are large and full-grown, with many half-hidden paths and fully-hidden alcoves.  As they pass one of these, Rolshe asks lowly, “What brings our illustrious president out to Two in the middle of the Games?”

“Oh,” Snow says, hmmming slightly, “this and that,” and when next he meets his gaze, understanding passes wordlessly between them.  Which was the purpose of meeting face-to-face at the outset. A man can look into someone’s eyes and see truths that a projection distorts. Inflections of voice modulate too quickly for microphones to catch. And, of course, video transmissions are never ever _entirely_ secure.

“I see. But I think you’ve wasted a trip. This was an isolated incident. I think,” Rolshe carefully says, folding his arms and tucking his chin to his chest, “once these Games have run their course, so will have the danger.”

And that is that. Their talk turns to family, and then the weather, and after barely half an hour has passed, Snow is ready to depart, having brought no luggage and no entourage. Like a boat faced with an irritable wind, Snow will stay his course.

 

On the way to the air base, Phoebus's wife catches up to him. His guards part for her with small nods, in deference to her rank. “President Snow. My husband neglected to mention you were in the District.”

Snow smiles wryly, readjusting his cuffs so that they ride a bit looser at his wrists. “Just as Phoebus would, Deliah. Although, in truth, it would have been better for me to have come and gone entirely unnoted.”  Almost certainly she is aware that he has met with her father. Without a doubt, she deduces what this signifies.

“I understand. Zoe will be sad to have missed you.”

“You’ve not told her?”

“Not yet. I can refrain, if you’d prefer.”

Snow pauses a moment. Concrete stretches to the four points of the compass, a hovercraft marring it to the east, his guards standing respectfully several feet back. He eases the day’s rose from his lapel and puts a thumb to its velvet petals, briefly, before extending it to Deliah. “No. Tell her I was here, and give her this, with my love.”

A smile plays around Deliah’s face.  Her mouth is soft, and contrasts too sharply with the severity of her bobbed hair, although Snow does not think a single living soul has ever dared inform her of this. “She’s always liked these silly things.” She meets his eyes again, the smile receding. “Fly safely.”

* * *

In his absence, things have progressed. The boy is injured now, and Crane's idea has succeeded in fooling everyone in the nation into thinking that the two Twelves are in love, except, perhaps, Everdeen herself.  Although she makes a good show of it.  Aside from death, there isn't much more he can ask from her than a good show.

* * *

 

When the Muttations are released into the Arena-- human/beast hybrids whose brutality Snow can prize and yet simultaneously recognize as uniquely horrendous-- Crane assures him that this move will finally end the Games and neutralize Everdeen.  On the dubious strength of this conviction, Snow convenes his customary gathering of close advisors and trusted ministers for a viewing party, so that they might enjoy together the recurring symbolic triumph of the Capitol over the Districts once more.

Snow sprawls leonine in a corner armchair that sacrifices screen viewing angle for a vantage point on the entire room. He dispassionately watches the sliver of projection showing the standoff between the Twelves and the final Career on top of the cornucopia.  In that chair, surrounded by the trappings of his own power and those subject to it, he feels at ease. Similarly lulled, several people make casual bets.   

Everdeen stuns them all with her sharpshooting, once again, and even goes so far as to put the boy out of his misery before the Muttations can finish their meal. Money changes hands. The simulated day-cycle of the arena shifts out of nighttime and into daylight-- Crane likes to end things in the light, a symbolic flair of his-- and Templesmith announces the rule change stating that two victors will no longer be allowed. The last piece falls into place.    

Reasonably, Peeta Mellark points out to her that the Capitol must have a victor.

Of _course_ the Capitol (of course _he)_ will have a victor, singular, and it shall not be either tribute from District Twelve but Snow himself, for this final rule change will nip Katniss Everdeen in the bud before she ever has a chance to fully flower.  Death awaits her through door number one, or, if she chooses the (more likely) door number two, she will kill her young love and destroy any sympathies the Districts may have with her. All she need do is choose. The entirety of the room, and Panem, holds its collective breath.  If Snow were a betting man, he’d put his money on her.

Katniss Everdeen eschews the open doors of choice before her and climbs through a window.  She uncurls her fingers and reveals the nightlock berries sitting so innocently in her outstretched hand. “No,” she tells Peeta Mellark. “They don’t. Why should they?”

The convivial atmosphere leeches out of the room. Dissatisfaction settles in him, heavy and long-unfamiliar. His mouth is a firm line and his eyes become fixed; as fixed as he is in the chair, unable to take any action that might affect what is unfolding in front of him in time. Guests take their turns shooting covert looks his way, but though their pretense is flimsy, he feigns ignorance of their indiscretion. Mellark and Everdeen raise the berries to their lips, but he hardly needs to watch them do it. Their fate is assured at this point, regardless of if they should die or if Crane should order a frantic last-second re-redaction and spare them.  

Two mistakes have been made.  The first was hers; not in brazenly flaunting the Capitol’s rules but in encouraging the curious to seek an answer to the dangerous question of _why should they?_

The second mistake was his own, in giving Crane a second chance to handle the problem of Everdeen, and having him fail again. This mistake was the indolence of not intervening directly while he still had the chance to make it look like an accident. Because the damned girl is right: the Capitol must have its victor.

Or, in this case, its victors.

Somehow, she knew this. She won on the strength of a bluff, betting with her life and winning the Capitol’s dignity. Snow is not a gambling man. And yet—he’s lost.

“Water,” he demands of no one in particular, and in an instant, a glass filled with ice that has yet to even condensate appears in his hand. He waits until all eyes have finally left him, drawn back one by one to the projection. When the cameras finally cut off the tribute’s extraction hovercraft and Flickerman once more fills the screen, giving an ebullient post-Games breakdown, Snow sinks into his seat and lets his eyes half-close, drumming the pads of his fingers against the chilled glass.

He beckons to Antonius, his Minister of Capitol Defense, and waits patiently as the man kneels down so that Snow can speak directly into his ear.

“This must not happen again,” he says, folding his glass and his hands over his stomach.

Antonius understands immediately. “Do you have a preference?”

Snow considers. An elegant solution stands out from within the morass of his thoughts. “He should die as the victors failed to.” Nightlock is a more overt poison than usually is his wont, but then, Seneca Crane’s transgressions are far more public than he usually allows.

“Fitting.”

“Yes, I think so too. Have it done soon.”

The man sees himself out.

 

The next day, the victors are washed and primped and dressed and brought out in front of a ravening crowd for the crowning ceremony. Some victors are forced to appear with far worse injuries than theirs, often dripping blood quietly onto the dais. At least Everdeen and Mellark made it out with all their limbs.

They are not given microphones for the ceremony, so Snow steps in close to Everdeen and offers her a low congratulations. When she parts her lips to say thank you, he can hear her tongue wetly separating from the roof of her mouth. It is nearly tangible in its crispness. Gone are projection distortions and speaker infidelity; here in front of him is a living, breathing threat.

A glint catches his eye. Delicately, he shifts aside her hair to reveal a bird-shaped brooch of gold. “What a lovely pin,” he comments.

“Thank you. It’s from my district,” she informs him, but the fact that she has chosen to hide it speaks more eloquently than her innocuous explanation. He merely sets the crown into place on her head and moves on to Mellark, with whom he exchanges no words at all.

She does not even suspect it, but from this moment on she is a dead man walking, doomed to die for the part she played in destabilizing a crucial food-producing District and for the potential she possesses for further chaos.  Crane is at that moment being put down, like a dog too feeble to hunt, but _her_ coming death will be his own toast in acknowledgement of the weapon she held, if only for that one instant spent preparing for suicide live in front of an entire nation.  Her death will be an announcement, and it will say: _this girl nearly possessed power over the Capitol. Never again._

This girl, nearly, held power over _him_.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is already written in its entirety. However, subsequent chapters have not yet been edited or betaed, both of which take time that I severely lack now that my classes have started. Take comfort that this WIP has a definite ending, although that ending may be long in coming. I will aim for updates every two weeks and try not to let more than a month pass at most, but I don't want to be any narrower than that because school of course has to come first.
> 
> This was a passion project, and a very niche one at that. It is the longest (for the moment around 40k, may end up being closer to 50k) thing I have written in six years of fandom. I realize that the subject matter isn't hugely popular with THG's usual readership, but I don't write for the fandom at large: I write for the one person. This fic is everything I wanted to read but couldn't find, so I wrote it for myself, and if I wanted it, someone else in the world probably does too, even if there's only one of you. If you are that one, I beg of you-- tell me! Leave a review, not just a kudo. Let me know that I'm not just screaming into the void and reassure me that an entire summer spent writing this was not merely for my own gratification.
> 
> On that note, thank you to anyone who made it to the end of this chapter, and thanks also to my perpetual beta Ias. With any luck, the next chapter-- covering the events of CF-- will be along some time mid-September.


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